Betrayal at the House Game Review

Betrayal at the House on the Hill Game Review

Now that all of the Zombie, Witches, Vampires, Creatures from the Abyss costumes are being stored away for another year, I thought that I would do a review of a game that has replaced Clue.

Betrayal at the House on the Hill is a semi cooperative board game that allows the players to explore a ever changing house. This means that the house will be very different from the last time you played, this means loads of replayability.

Betrayal at the House Video Review/Walkthrough

I did a walkthrough of this game. There are many of intricacies to each of the cards. I was not able to get into attacking, trading, and a few of the other mechanics. I did show up to the point of the Betrayal with the Final Haunt Roll.

Betrayal at the House Overview

The game starts with a bit of set up, after you have your characters handed out, and everything looks like the instruction book, you are ready.

This is the start of the house, everyone gets to move spaces equal to their speed stat. Once you walk through a door symbol, we flip a card matching the floor you are on and add it to the house. Most of the rooms have extra symbols that allow you to draw from 1-3 decks.

These items add to your over all character knowledge and abilities. The Omen deck causes a terrifying haunt roll to be rolled. If the haunt roll is ever lower than the amount of current omen cards drawn, the haunt starts and the Betrayer is revealed.

These are the guides that are handed out to the players to show what they need to do to survive, or crush the other players.

Betrayal at the House My Thoughts

Overall this concept of building a board as you play has always been a fun one. I like Carcassonne for the same reasons, although Betrayal does essentially play out differently.

If you are a fan of Coop games, where you play together and help make decisions, this game does have that element within it, but there is also another “sense” to the game”, where we are playing for ourselves. As you play through several times you will understand what I mean. When we first started playing, we as a group were always good about giving over items to players that could use them most effectively(sorta like what you do with loot in other games). But we lost several games to a Betrayer who had all of the items that we had given to him/her.

The components are fairly good. The tiles are great, the minis are nice and painted, the draw cards have nice quality, BUT the markers for the Character cards are awful, and the markers for monsters are a bit underwhelming.

We have to add a few things to take care of those 2 quality issues, one thing that we can do for the character cards is this:

These are mini close pins that you can get at Hobby Lobby, this idea was thought of by Bart Dorsey.

Their is other ways to fix the problem as well, but this seemed to be the least labor intensive.

The monster marker fix actually means that you need to buy other minis, or take them from your other games.